The present application is a continuation of International Application No. PCT/EP00/11166, filed Nov. 11, 2000 and published in English pursuant to PCT Article 21(2), now abandoned, and which claims priority to Swedish Application No. 9904099-0, filed Nov. 11, 1999. The disclosures of said applications are expressly incorporated herein by reference in their entirety.
1. Technical Field
The invention relates to a system and method for monitoring and/or operating one or more objects and especially for communication between one or more moving objects, like vehicles and at least one supervisor station by means of transmitting and receiving means.
This system and method is especially suitable when provided for exchange of information and data between moving objects like cars, trucks or other vehicles on the one hand, and one or more central stations on the other hand, which are for example a service station of a manufacturer or a headstation for guiding or operating the vehicles. Further, the system and method is suitable and provided for communication with facilities and plants in remote areas which are operated, controlled, observed or monitored from one or more central stations.
2. Background Art
The development of vehicles is a very time consuming process. A considerable part of the lead time for a vehicle project is the time for testing components and the complete vehicle. These tests are affected with efficiency problems of different kinds. During the operation of such vehicles, there is no possibility to supervise the test and to verify the quality of the test or to check the quality of the data before the vehicles return to the related station. Further, there is no possibility to change the test setup during operation in response to certain operating conditions like oil temperature or fuel consumption or in response to changing weather conditions like high or low temperatures. In such cases, the vehicles have to return to the central station and the test setup has to be adapted accordingly. Further, it takes a long time between data acquisition and validation. All this has to be done for a plurality of vehicles at the same time which is often difficult to handle and requires a costly organization.
A similar problem is imposed when several vehicles are operated in normal use for example by a haulage or cargo agency. Routes must be planned in dependency of the places where goods or products have to be picked up and places where such goods or products have to be delivered. Further, especially if these routes lead through remote and sparsely settled areas, they must be carefully planned under consideration of the current position of each vehicle and of the operating conditions of each vehicle like fuel and oil consumption, maintenance intervals and possible failure of a vehicle component.
Consequently, it is a first object of the invention to make development of vehicles (or other moving objects) easier and faster with respect to the time necessary for testing the vehicle and its components.
It is a second object of the invention to make operation of one or more vehicles (or other moving objects) more efficient and economical by increasing availability and minimizing or eliminating the time necessary for interruption of operation for the purpose of maintenance and/or taking fuel.
It is a further object of the invention to provide a system and method for communication between at least one moving object like a vehicle and at least one supervisor station by means of transmitting and receiving means, by which testing, checking, monitoring, operating and/or controlling of components and/or the entire object is made easier, faster and more efficient and economical, respectively.
These and other objects are achieved by a system for monitoring and/or operating one or more vehicles (or other moving objects), in which each vehicle is assigned an internet address and comprises an interface to the internet via a wireless telecommunication unit. Sensors and/or actuators for monitoring and/or affecting components and/or conditions of the vehicle are connected to the interface, so that a connection between a supervisor station and each vehicle can be established via the internet for evaluating conditions of the related components by way of the sensors and/or actuators.
This solution has several advantages. By monitoring vehicle components and operating conditions during operation of the vehicle, evaluation and prediction of the behavior, load, wear, reliability, life span and remaining time until possible failure is substantially improved. Such evaluation and prediction can further be improved by affecting certain conditions by actuators and observing the resulting reaction of the related components. This not only accelerates development as related above, but also makes route planning easier because failure of a component (or running short of fuel) can be predicted efficiently. In this way, related component(s) can be exchanged in due time and especially on occasion of a normal stop, for example, when picking up or delivering of goods or products, so that extra interruptions of operation of the vehicle for maintenance purposes is largely avoided.
At the supervisor station which can exemplarily take the form of a central station, a remote supervisor of any physical quantity detected by a sensor, as well as an online data analysis which can be conducted via the internet. A remote file transfer of the test results leads to a considerable reduction of the time necessary for testing and checking vehicles and their components during development process. The system has advanced trigger capabilities and is very flexible and easy to adapt on different user demands and situations, but is nevertheless very small and inexpensive to be realized.